Apple II Bits

When John Romero was the keynote speaker for KansasFest 2012, an old friend was in the audience: Lane Roathe, KansasFest 2008 keynote speaker. The two had worked together at Softdisk and later founded Ideas from the Deep, or id.

But there was a third person in that original triumverate of founders: John Carmack. Like Romero and Roathe, Carmack has remained active in the games industry, currently serving as the CTO for Oculus, Facebook’s virtual-reality company. And, also like Romero and Roathe, Carmack hasn’t forgotten his roots.

In 2012, Carmack got an Apple IIc for Christmas; in 2015, he introduced it to his son. If he tweets about the Apple II every three years, then he maintained that tradition coinciding with this month’s KansasFest:

Every year now, I wistfully think about how fun it would be to just show up at #A2KFest with some brand new 8 bit code. I know I don't have time to do a real project, but maybe just a demo…

— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) July 18, 2018

He later reiterated his interest, reminiscing about the constraints of the Apple II that breed creativity:

I have inevitably fallen on the side of modern and useful, but I do feel the combined tug of nostalgia and tiny-system optimization.

— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) July 18, 2018

Carmack is definitely a guy who knows what’s up and isn’t that many steps removed from our community: despite not following the @KansasFest account, Carmack even knew the hashtag to use — perhaps from following Jason Scott.

At least two KansasFest members acknowledged Carmack’s tweets with replies, the first being frequent HackFest judge Quinn Dunki:

https://twitter.com/QuinnDunki/status/1019665785629958145

Followed by KansasFest committee member Andy Molloy:

John, you'd be so welcome at KFest. Apple II projects & camaraderie going on day and night in a college dorm–doesn't get much better.

— The Geth Consensus (@teggas) July 18, 2018

How long before Carmack joins the ranks of KansasFest keynote speakers, with Romero and Roathe in the audience?

(Full disclosure: Although I was part of the committee that recruited Roathe and Romero, I am not currently a member of the KansasFest committee and do not have any insider knowledge about the current speaker selection process. This post is based solely on observation of public information and speculation.)

As reported by the Cult of Mac, id co-founder John Carmack recently tweeted a photo of his son learning to program on an Apple IIc:

Teaching my kids programming on an Apple //c is like kung fu training in the primitive wilderness. pic.twitter.com/fHCHuFA4ni

— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) February 23, 2015

This looks like the same IIc that Carmack received as a Christmas gift in 2012:

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/283632618946318336

The Apple II and education go hand-in-glove — this post is the site’s 18th to be tagged "education". However, the two sentences of the Cult of Mac’s story that struck me have little to do with education. First is this detail of Carmack’s origin story: "As a kid at Shawnee Mission East public school (one of the first in his family’s part of Kansas to get a computer lab), Carmack taught himself BASIC on an Apple II." Shawnee Mission is only 12 miles from Rockhurst University, home of KansasFest; might it be a homecoming to invite Carmack to be the event’s keynote speaker, joining his former colleague John Romero among the speaker alumni?

That paragraph’s next sentence is a wonderful example of unintended consequences: "Later on, [Carmack] bought an Apple IIGS to start his game-making career, as revealed in the fantastic book Masters of Doom." And it was that 2003 book book by David Kushner that inspired the 2005 founding of social news website reddit, as detailed by co-founder Alexis Ohanian:

… this book convinced me to consider starting a company. It just seemed like so much damn fun. Granted, we didn’t end up starting a gaming company (well, I guess we had ‘gamification’ before that was a buzzword: karma, leaderboards, awards, etc) but the idea a few friends could get together in a house and start building something the world had never seen before — having a lot of fun in the process — got me hooked.

Would reddit and its AMAs exist without Carmack and Romero — and thus without the Apple II? Likely not!

Who knows what the next generation of programmers will create and inspire, thanks to the Apple II?

(Hat tip to Steve Weyhrich)

Today, the KansasFest committee released this image:

The blog post had no title (-20 to SEO), no body (-10), no ALT or TITLE tags (-5), and no informative filename (kfest2014.png) or slug (kfest-2014-teaser) — that is to say, no hidden clues.

But that isn’t to say we can’t make some inferences. Today is not the first time the KansasFest committee issued a teaser in advance of announcing the keynote speaker. In 2012, they posted this image to their Web site:

The image made no attempt at being obtuse: gamers quickly recognized it as the logo of Quake, a quintessential first-person shooter from id software, original creators of the Apple IIGS game Wolfenstein 3D. Early id employees included Softdisk alumni John Romero and John Carmack, as well as former KansasFest keynote speaker Lane Roathe. Carmack still has a streak of the retrocomputing enthusiast in him:
https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/283632618946318336

Given Carmack’s commitments to id and Oculus, it seemed unlikely he was available to speak at an Apple II convention. That left only John Romero — who was confirmed only hours later with an official press release.

So what can we learn from this latest image out of KansasFest? It features an entirely different style from the logos used for KansasFests 2006–2013. Presuming this teaser image is in fact the 2014 logo, and that its departure from tradition is not merely for aesthetic purposes, we should investigate its influences.

Fortunately, the committee has made this part easy. The logo was posted to not only the KansasFest blog, but also various social media sites, including the Softalk Forever group on Facebook. There, KansasFest publicist Peter Neubauer confirmed that this logo was designed in collaboration with committee chair Tony Diaz, who "created a new font using letters captured from original issues."

The debut issue of Softalk.

I’m not a former reader of Softalk, so I read Steve Weyhrich’s history of the publication. Of the names that were associated with the magazine over the years, two stand out. According to Wikipedia, "Softalk along with founder/editor Margot Comstock and founder/publisher Al Tommervik are named as pioneers of the microcomputer industry in the Smithsonian Institution." Of the two, Comstock is an active participant in the Apple II Enthusiasts group on Facebook. She has also collaborated with Mike Maginnis on providing material to the Apple II Scans project.

Perhaps Comstock is too obvious a choice for this year’s keynote speaker — after all, the committee has done an excellent job in recent years of bringing unexpected celebrities out of the woodwork, such as John Romero, Mark Simonsen, David Szetela, and Randy Wigginton. But who else associated with Softalk would fit in the impressive lineup of past speakers?

No matter what, I’ll be at KansasFest 2014. But for an opening act? My money’s on Comstock.